ART SERIES: Women’s Wisdom

Art series by Anna Brone

Wanting to showcase the insight of inspiring women, both historical and modern, in an artistic way, in early 2018 I started the Women’s Wisdom Project. When I complete the project by the end of 2019, I will have profiled 100 women. Each portrait is paired with a quote, and hand cut from a single piece of paper. For many of the modern women that I feature, I often do an interview with them as well. I don’t have a particular strategy in choosing women, but over the course of this project I have basically noted down interesting women as I have come across them. It has been humbling to realize how lacking my own knowledge of women’s history is. Like Maria Mitchell, America’s first female astronomer. I bet we all can name 5 famous male scientists, but what about women? Or Gloria Anzaldúa, an important feminist writer, activist and scholar who I had never read before. So working on this project has been a real wake up call as to how little women have been included in our history books, particularly women of color. Because I profile a woman with a quote of hers, that requires her quote to have been noted down some where; either in an essay, a speech, a book, etc. For so long women weren’t even offered those platforms, so working on this project has made me think a lot about all the women’s voices that we don’t hear from, and all the wisdom that we have missed out on because of it.

Anna Brones is a writer, artist, and producer. She is the author of several books including Fika the Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, Best Served Wild: Real Food for Real Adventures, Paris Coffee Revolution and Live Lagom: Balanced Living the Swedish Way. She is the founder and publisher of Comestible, a zine about food and she also works as a papercut artist, handcutting illustrations from single pieces of paper. Her illustrations are featured in the new edition of the iconic cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. She is the Impact Producer of Afghan Cycles, a film about women cyclists in Afghanistan. When she is not writing or making art she is probably on her bicycle or making coffee outside. annabrones.com